From keyboards to cables to, ow, paper,
AmazonBasics is consistently not great, but good enough.
And in the case of their newest offering,
that might actually be a good enough reason
to pull the trigger, assuming that you can find it.
Like anything you actually wanna buy on Amazon,
we found the AmazonBasics CPU cooler
buried under four pages of sponsored crap
and curiously, completely devoid
of an Amazon's Choice badge.
So what are you hiding, Jeff?
I mean, Andy?
Well, we found one thing.
Between two identical units of this cooler,
we found a stark difference in performance,
so much that if you got a bad one,
your system could run measurably slower.
Oh, and we found a second thing,
this message from our sponsor.
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This magnificent tower of aluminum and copper
with two Cooler Master logos
and a third backwards Cooler Master logo.
But how can this be?
All right, the explanation that was given to us
from Cooler Master's thermals team
was that based on the H412R,
they approved the design and technology
for the AmazonBasics cooler,
which is a very vague and roundabout way of saying
we're the ones manufacturing it for them,
which is why we didn't sue their asses,
but we can't say that directly because we signed an NDA,
which kind of makes sense.
I mean, AmazonBasics doesn't manufacture anything.
They just take an existing product
that meets their standards and slap their label on it,
or they make some changes
to make it worthy of the AmazonBasics name.
So let's see what changes, if any, they made to the H412R.
The first one is obvious.
Printing like this adds about 50 cents to a dollar
to the cost of each box,
which is totally unnecessary for a product
that will never need to stand out on a store shelf.
So Amazon went for the au naturel look.
Then as we were unpacking the heat sinks,
we found the same accessory box,
identical packing materials,
and even the included thermal compound is identical,
just sans logo.
Maybe if we look closely at the cooler itself.
Ah, the stamped geometry of the fins is slightly altered.
And perhaps more importantly,
Amazon literally cut corners on their branded unit.
Hopefully that doesn't affect performance too badly.
And this is interesting.
Despite having identical part numbers,
the fans are not the same.
Amazon's has RGB and a different sticker.
Speaking of big differences,
our 64 ounce water bottle is three times the size
of our 21 ounce for the same price, lttstore.com.
So lower price, more RGB,
and seemingly manufactured by an expert,
a master, you might say, in the cooler space.
So far, so good.
But remember how I said Amazon
isn't even spotlighting their own cooler as Amazon's choice?
They don't disclose what makes an item their choice,
but for CPU coolers,
the Be Quiet Pure Rock 2 for 45 bucks
is their current recommendation.
All right, Amazon, I'll play ball,
but we're gonna do it my way.
Ah!
Damn it.
With a roundup of the most popular coolers
around that price point.
We're gonna have them all linked down below.
We settled on a Core i5-13600K for our test.
Since it doesn't include a cooler in the box
and it shouldn't overwhelm our value oriented coolers here.
Starting off with Far Cry 5,
the Amazon basics matches its Cooler Master cousin exactly
with peaks of 73 degrees Celsius
and averages within half a degree of each other.
However, when we add in the rest of our contenders,
well, we immediately see two things.
First, the reason that Intel doesn't bother
including their piece of crap cooler with the 13600K.
And second, the reason that Amazon won't play its own kid
when the game is on the line.
If you were thinking the situation might change
in other titles, the sad news is no, no, and no,
but that doesn't mean we've seen the whole story yet.
Moving to our heavier multi-threaded loads,
we found that while our system performance
was identical in handbrake
and both coolers reached the same peak values,
the Cooler Master variant managed
slightly lower temperatures on average
and then moving into Cinebench,
we're looking at a three degree difference
and our first impact on performance.
Whether it's the fin geometry, the missing corners,
or just a slight difference in the RPM of the included fan,
our Amazon basics cooler falls behind
by anywhere from five megahertz to a hundred megahertz.
Wait, that's a pretty big range.
What's going on here?
Ah, funny story.
We accidentally bought two samples of the Amazon basic CPU
cooler and since we had them,
we figured that wouldn't hurt to test them,
except it did hurt.
It hurt Amazon, it hurt Cooler Master,
and it hurt our poor CPU.
In most of our tests,
they performed identically to each other.
That is to say worse than just about everything else
in the same price range.
But in our Cinebench test,
our second unit thermal throttled over a minute sooner,
pushing our CPU clock speed
and therefore our performance measurably lower.
But why?
In a word, quality control.
We found multiple issues with our weaker sample.
The flatness of the base left a lot to be desired.
Look at the way a fingernail catches on the gaps
between the heat pipes.
The press fit aluminum fins
don't seem to be making perfect contact
with the copper heat pipes.
They're not soldered, so they're just stuck on there.
And while the rated RPM of all of our fans was the same,
the recorded RPM of this unit's fan was about 5% lower.
That's still within spec,
but it's clear that all of these things together
can add up to a lesser experience.
Not that it really changes the conclusion,
because the bigger issue here
is that even looking at the better unit of the two,
I don't see any reason to consider Amazon's offering
when the cheapest one we tested,
the $20 ID cooling S-214XT,
outperformed both of our Amazon samples in every test.
It also has RGB,
and it uses a much better Noctua-inspired mounting system
compared to the flimsy Amazon slash Cooler Master one.
I think the kindest thing that I can say about this thing
is that it's better than a stock cooler.
And I guess to their credit,
Amazon also has a pretty good video
showing how to install their cooler
on both Intel and AMD's platforms.
Ultimately though,
I can't help but feel like this was a missed opportunity.
The Amazon basic CPU cooler
performs like a subpar version
of its aging Cooler Master cousin,
which was clearly the wrong choice for Amazon
to use as a template for their own cooler.
If they wanted a sponsor segue
they could use as a template though,
it would be this one, two hour sponsor.
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If you enjoyed this video,
shout out for sticking around for the credits,
you might also wanna check out our all Amazon basic setup
where James literally threw their whole catalog at me.
Literally, like at my face, what a guy.